The macadamia nut tree out the back of my place is flowering and is covered with long, yellow flower spikes. In a few months it will be covered in nuts. However, in world markets right now there is a shortage of whole macadamia nut kernels. While stocks remain scarce, macadamia products are at increased risk of fraudulent activity. Whole kernels are less likely than other macadamia products to be affected by fraudulent adulteration, however they are still at risk of fraudulent misrepresentation of country of origin, packing date and organic status. Nut pieces, meals and flours are at risk of fraudulent adulteration with cheaper fillers and substitutes.

Here are some other interesting issues in food fraud or potential food fraud from the last month:

Are breadfruit products an emerging fraud risk? Breadfruit is a starchy tropical fruit that grows on large trees in the Pacific Islands and the Carribean. Breadfruit flour is said to have huge potential as a gluten-free product and breadfruit could become the next ‘superfood’, but right now demand outstrips supply and new trees take 3 to 5 years to bear fruit. If the marketing gurus succeed in making breadfruit the next big thing, it will attract a premium price in North America and Europe and gluten-free breadfruit flour could become an attractive target for fraud. I will be watching this product closely to see how the situation develops.

Is breadfruit destined to be the next ‘superfood’?

Hairy crabs, a delicacy in parts of China, are in season now, with crabs from particular lakes being very highly prized and even more expensive than their counterparts from other lakes. A crab-marketing group representing hunters from Yangcheng lake designed an anti-counterfeiting system based on bar-code technology for Yangcheng crabs. Unfortunately, they discovered that sellers of crabs from other lakes were forging the anti-fraud bar-codes. I predict this type of fraud to increase over the next few years as consumers come to expect and trust anti-counterfeit measures applied to expensive consumer items.

The supplement industry received a wakeup call last year, particularly in the USA, after the New York attorney general commenced legal proceedings against 13 supplements manufacturers alleging that the supplements did not contain exactly what they should have contained. The sampling and test methodology used to support the prosecution has been widely criticised, and the industry considers the results to be questionable at best. Nevertheless, the issue of authenticity and adulteration has received extra attention among producers and users of supplements since then.

Some examples of recent supplement frauds have involved grape seed extract adulterated with peanut skins. Ironically, grape seed extract has also been found to be an adulterant itself, with some cranberry products adulterated. Within the supplements investigated by the New York attorney general, valerian was found to contain garlic and wild carrot, echinacea was found to contain rice and buttercup DNA while St Johns wort was alleged to contain DNA from a species of ornamental house plant.

What’s being done? Well you won’t read about it in the press but there’s no question that large retailers, including those that were targeted by the New York attorney general, such as Walmart, Target, GNC and Walgreens, have reviewed and tightened up their purchasing contracts; supplement testing methodology has been reviewed and reputable supplement manufacturers are testing more of their ingredients more often. And that’s great news for consumers.

This piece started life as a good news story; results released by the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) in January show that more than 99% of tested foods contained either no detectable pesticide residues or residues below the allowable limits. The USDA has been quick to share these results and assure consumers of the safety of the American food supply. But there are some disturbing results within the raw data, results that are not mentioned in the official report. In fact, for one industry sector, the results are very bad news indeed.

The tests were conducted by the USDA as part of its pesticide data program (PDP) during the calendar year of 2014 and the results were published in January 2016. During 2014, testing was conducted on 10,619 samples of food (mainly fresh produce), and each sample was tested for about 200 pesticides. That’s a lot of data, over two million test results in total, and the USDA does not include all of the results in their public reports, although they do share their raw data with anyone who wants to download it. One aspect of the testing that is not discussed in the official report is that each of the ten thousand samples was categorized according to its marketing claim. While the overwhelming majority of samples were categorized as ‘no claim’, there were 416 samples of products claiming to be either pesticide free or organic.

A closer inspection of the raw data shows that of those 416 samples, 22% of them returned a positive result for at least one pesticide, often more than one. That is, almost one quarter of all ‘organic or ‘pesticide free’ products contained pesticide residues. And 10 of the 416 samples actually contained pesticide/s at levels denoted by the USDA as a violation or presumptive violation of allowed limits. Approximately 2% of products that claimed to be ‘organic’ or ‘pesticide free’ in fact contained unsafe levels of pesticides.

The worst offenders were ‘organic’ frozen cherries. Every sample of organic frozen cherries contained residues of at least one pesticide. The results were similar for conventional frozen cherries. Within both types, there were also a number of samples with violations or presumptive violations (unsafe levels) of pesticide. Disturbingly, the organic frozen cherries had a much higher proportion of samples with unsafe levels of pesticide than the conventional frozen cherries.

Tomatoes also gave disturbing results; 75% of ‘organic’ and ‘pesticide free’ tomatoes contained at least one pesticide and 25% of them had unsafe levels of carbendazim (MBC) pesticide. By comparison, only 18% of the tomatoes marketed without claims were found to be in violation of the pesticide limits.

Grape juice was another commodity that fared poorly for organic claims; of the 531 conventional and organic samples that were tested, there was only one that had pesticide levels deemed to be unsafe… it was labelled ‘organic’ and made in the USA.

What does this mean for organic foods?

Are organic foods free from pesticide residues? In a word: no. A significant proportion of organic foods contain pesticide residues and some contain pesticides at levels that have been deemed unsafe. The pesticides detected on organic foods in the PDP study were almost entirely synthetic chemical pesticides that are not approved for use on organic crops. The study did not include testing for commonly used organic-approved pesticides.

Do organic foods contain less pesticide and are they safer than conventionally grown foods? Yes and no… the PDP data presents a complicated picture, with huge differences between commodity types, but on the whole, there were less detections of pesticide residues within the organic and pesticide free samples than the conventional samples. However, the proportion of samples that were in violation of pesticide limits was comparable. That is, if you live in the USA, the chance of consuming a product with levels of pesticide deemed unsafe by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is similar, whether you purchase organic food or not.

Are some foods better than others?

The 2014 PDP testing regime included 26 food types. Most were fresh or processed (canned or frozen) fruit and vegetables but testing was also performed on oats, rice, infant formula and salmon. Carrots and nectarines were two foods for which the organic samples had better results than their conventional counterparts. Both of these foods types had many samples that contained residues; for example, almost 100% of conventional nectarines and 96% of conventional carrots contained at least one pesticide. There were samples with violations or presumptive violations (unsafe levels) of pesticides for both conventional and organic carrots and nectarines, however the organic produce had lower proportions of samples with detectable levels of residues and lower numbers of samples with unsafe levels.

Organic summer squashes also fared well compared to their conventional counterparts, with less samples containing residue at any level and also less samples with unsafe levels. Other organic foods, including blueberries, celery, canned green beans and fresh peaches, had lower proportions of samples with detected residues, but unfortunately, for those foods the proportion of samples with unsafe levels was similar for both conventional and organic types.

Both organic and conventional samples had excellent results for dairy-based infant formula and salmon. Neither of those foods contained residue of any kind in any sample of either conventional or organic types. Salmon samples included fresh, frozen, wild-caught and farmed salmon of different varieties from ten countries.

Consumers want transparency. It’s a phrase I hear all the time in supply chain and food safety circles. Ask consumers if they want transparency and the answer is overwhelmingly ‘yes’. It seems obvious; transparency equals knowledge, knowledge equals informed decisions, informed decisions result in good purchasing practices and good purchasing practices are a win for both consumers and suppliers. But is that how food purchasing really works?

If consumers say they want transparency, and in a study by BBMG, GlobeScan and SustainAbility a total 82% of consumers reported that “ingredient transparency is a very important or important factor” when shopping for food and beverages, why is it that ingredient transparency remains relatively unusual for most food products?

As a young food technologist working for a large snack food manufacturer, I learnt a valuable lesson in understanding consumer behaviour; those of us in marketing and product development jobs were very good at imagining the wants and preferences of our core consumers. We were almost always wrong. I was lucky enough to work for an organisation that was willing to spend money on focussed, in-depth and product-specific market research and we used that research to refine our product offerings and strengthen our brands. What we learnt was that our own white-collar preferences were quite unlike the preferences of our core consumers and that self-reported attitudes to products almost never aligned with actual purchasing behaviour. When it was time for consumers to select a bag of snacks from a retail store shelf, the qualities that we had been focussing on in our product development laboratory contributed very little to the decisions that were made.

I see the same thing in the current commentary of food safety and integrity professionals. Traceability and transparency are important to food professionals and this is likely to be reflected in our food purchasing habits. But for most people, food purchasing decisions are dominated by availability, cost, quality and sensory preferences. Transparency is nice to have, but if it comes with a higher price tag it is unlikely to result in increased sales of a food product. I don’t doubt that this is something most large food processors already understand. We will continue to hear calls for supply chain transparency but we won’t be seeing it on an ordinary big-brand box of cookies any time soon.

The US FDA has published guidance for food manufacturers about labeling of food derived from genetically engineered plants. The guidance document discourages the use of the acronym GMO (genetically modified organism), preferring instead the terms ‘genetically engineered’, ‘bioengineered’ or ‘modern biotechnology’.

The intention of the guidance is to prevent claims that could mislead consumers, and the guidance reminds food businesses that it is possible to mislead consumers with information and also with absence of information.

So why not use GMO? Firstly ‘genetically modified’, when used in the strictest sense, applies to almost all of the plant and animal foods we regularly eat. Traditional selective breeding is a form of genetic modification that has been used by humans for thousands of years to improve the foods we grow. When viewed in this context, it is difficult to think of a food that isn’t ‘genetically modified’; the FDA gives the example of berries picked from wild varieties of bushes. With this in mind the term genetically modified becomes open to all kinds of interpretation and wider interpretation means more room for any claim to be misleading.

Secondly, very rarely to do we eat foods that contain actual ‘organisms’, live-culture fermented foods such as yoghurt being the exception. Mixed foods and highly refined foods do not contain organisms and even whole produce comes into question; is a tomato an ‘organism’ or is it merely food derived from the organism known as a tomato plant? Although the FDA acknowledges that consumers can understand the intention related to the use of the phrase GMO, the guidance document is quite specific about encouraging food manufacturers to use alternative phrases to avoid confusion.

It all sounds like a good plan from a legal and compliance perspective, but given that claims related to GMOs are used for the purpose of marketing foods, I have to wonder what the marketing teams of food businesses are going to say when told to replace ‘non-GMO’ with a phrase like this one suggested in the FDA Guidance document: “our tomato growers do not plant bioengineered seeds”. Catchy, huh?